The Adventures Harry Richmond — Complete eBook

Four-and-twenty German words of essential service
to a traveller in Germany constituted our knowledge
of the language, and these were on paper transcribed
by Miss Goodwin’s own hand. In the gloom
of the diligence, packed between Germans of a size
that not even Tacitus had prepared me for, smoked
over from all sides, it was a fascinating study.
Temple and I exchanged the paper half-hourly while
the light lasted. When that had fled, nothing
was left us to combat the sensation that we were in
the depths of a manure-bed, for the windows were closed,
the tobacco-smoke thickened, the hides of animals
wrapping our immense companions reeked; fire occasionally
glowed in their pipe-bowls; they were silent, and
gave out smoke and heat incessantly, like inanimate
forces of nature. I had most fantastic ideas,—­that
I had taken root and ripened, and must expect my head
to drop off at any instant: that I was deep down,
wedged in the solid mass of the earth. But I need
not repeat them: they were accurately translated
in imagination from my physical miseries. The
dim revival of light, when I had well-nigh ceased to
hope for it, showed us all like malefactors imperfectly
hanged, or drowned wretches in a cabin under water.
I had one Colossus bulging over my shoulder!
Temple was blotted out. His face, emerging from
beneath a block of curly bearskin, was like that of
one frozen in wonderment. Outside there was a
melting snow on the higher hills; the clouds over them
grew steel-blue. We were going through a valley
in a fir-forest.

CHAPTER XV

WE ARE ACCOSTED BY A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE LADY IN THE FOREST

Bowls of hot coffee and milk, with white rolls of
bread to dip in them, refreshed us at a forest inn.
For some minutes after the meal Temple and I talked
like interchangeing puffs of steam, but soon subsided
to our staring fit. The pipes were lit again.
What we heard sounded like a language of the rocks
and caves, and roots plucked up, a language of gluttons
feasting; the word ja was like a door always on the
hinge in every mouth. Dumpy children, bulky men,
compressed old women with baked faces, and comical
squat dogs, kept the villages partly alive. We
observed one young urchin sitting on a stone opposite
a dog, and he and the dog took alternate bites off
a platter-shaped cake, big enough to require both
his hands to hold it. Whether the dog ever snapped
more than his share was matter of speculation to us.
It was an education for him in good manners, and when
we were sitting at dinner we wished our companions
had enjoyed it. They fed with their heads in their
plates, splashed and clattered jaws, without paying
us any hospitable attention whatever, so that we had
the dish of Lazarus. They were perfectly kind,
notwithstanding, and allowed a portion of my great
map of Germany to lie spread over their knees in the
diligence, whilst Temple and I pored along the lines